


moonlit: a tale of love

by ohroses



Series: tales from yharnam [3]
Category: Bloodborne (Video Game)
Genre: Blood, F/M, Human/Monster Romance, Identity Issues, Lovecraftian Monster(s), Monster Romance, Mystery, So Married
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:14:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 15,535
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23732167
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohroses/pseuds/ohroses
Summary: A moonlit tale of lovers beset by hardship, though it might not appear that way at first. Thankfully, we know all about appearances in Yharnam.
Relationships: the hunter/original character
Series: tales from yharnam [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1447099
Comments: 17
Kudos: 20





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I often wonder if the hunter truly is solitary, and if he is not, what happens to those left on the outside the dream looking in? What happens to them, what must happen, for the hunter's tale to work?

“You found your way here yourself, and that’s just… Well, it’s _a miracle_ ,” the strange person said. His crimson, tattered robe shifted as he moved and spoke. It was unsettling, almost as if the cloth was part of his body. Ifeye tucked her skirt beneath her and knelt to answer him, her voice still scratchy and rough from screaming and crying. It hurt, but she wanted to be kind to this strange creature who welcomed her so warmly into his haven. She was also a little frightened of him. He looked revolting, wrong.

“I don’t know what would have happened if that gate hadn’t been already open,” she whispered. It was dumb luck. It was stupid, senseless luck that she had taken that path to Oedon Chapel and not the sewers. If she had taken the sewers, she was certain that whatever haunted them now would have made quick work of her. “It’s lucky, but I don’t know about miracles.”

“No, it is. I believe in fate, you know. I think you’re specially meant to be here.”

Ifeye smiled at him, grateful for his kindness, even if he was a little frightening. She put that smile on, the one her friends said was deadly. “Thank you. That makes you twice as special, if I found my way to _you_.” He stuttered nonsensically for a moment and seemed to genuinely melt at the praise. He looked… liquid, to her eyes. He seemed to melt into his red robes and then his robes seemed to melt into the stone of the chapel underneath him.

The strange being now taken care of and thoroughly vetted for any threat (there was none), she stood and wandered back over to the little door she had come through. Through that door was a library. It wasn’t safe, not by any means. It was a little trove of strange volumes and scattered tomes, covered roof to floor in bookshelves and ladders and littered with the maddened notes of some crazed scholar. It was cozy, calming, eerie, and entirely exposed. Just a ladder away was a little gutter that lead right to the horrible square where—

She’d wandered over to it several times over the course of the hour, and each time some haunting fear manifested in her heart. It paralyzed her, but still Ifeye couldn’t keep away. She ransacked the books she’d brought with her from that little library like a woman starved, ignoring the cooing, strange protests of the little dweller and her own terror as the ones she took pulled her back _there_.

“It’s so dangerous, please,” he said as she walked away from him, his voice floating through some fog in her mind as the door opened before her. “The hunter can’t save everyone if he’s not here, _”_ he said.

And she asked, like a girl dreaming, outside herself: _Who is the hunter?_ And the little dweller looked at her with those strange, hollow eyes and frowned. That frown woke her up. The door felt farther away, suddenly.

“He saved all the others. It’s so strange that you haven’t met him, you’re the only one who found this place on your own. He’s the nicest fellow I’ve ever met. A real hero. A little frightening,” and she’d bit back a harsh laugh at that, “but he’s good through and though.”

The others. He’d saved the others. He’d saved the woman in red who sat across from them in silence, doubled over sometimes, weakly moaning at other times. He’d saved the ill-tempered old woman that grumbled at her and called her terrible names when she’d tried to greet her, and he’d saved that mean man who watched her like a hawk and refused to speak to her directly. He’d saved that blood saint, the nun, who sometimes stared at the little dais where the chapel dweller resided with something like hatred in her eyes.

“I wonder if I’ll meet your hunter before the sun rises,” she said, settling into the little nook she’d made by the lanterns. She pulled out one of those terrible books and began to read, struggling with the script. It was strange. She’d only been here a few hours, but everything in her mind treated the time like years. _No matter how many times—_ she’d only tried to lock the trapdoor once, just an hour ago, but no matter how many times she tried to, it would be unlocked when she went into the library. Had she been to the library since she’d fallen out of it and into the chapel, weeping?

This was her first time reading these words, but she traced the strange lettering with her finger and felt like she’d read them a thousand times. Her mind followed them in shape and form, but her mind emptied when she read more than a line. She went back to the top of the page, and again her mind emptied by the bottom.

Sometimes, she felt like crying.

And sometimes she watched the chapel dweller murmur and the lady in red groan. No. This was the first time she had felt like crying. The tears came, unbidden, but familiarly. She bit her lips to silence herself, out of fear that the chapel dweller would hear. Something in her knew he would be deeply distressed at her pain and knew that she did not like it. He didn’t deserve it.

The hunter was there, sometime between one page and the next— Suddenly. There was a strange glow about him, but it must have been the moonlight overhead, filtering down to lend him some otherworldly radiance. He came right to her, without hesitation, and seemed unsurprised to see her seated in his safe haven. His shoulders blocked the light and obscured every word that was already blurred from her tears, he loomed over her like an immovable statue, his gaze cold and hard.

“You’re crying again. His voice was a dark rumble; he felt and sounded like a great stone. Enormous, imposing, not human. His eyes were rocks of granite in his covered face, his brows were stark and drawn together. They were connected, slightly, like the wings of a bird in flight. He was frightening, but eerily human. She wiped the tears from her face and shook her head resolutely.

“I’m not,” she lied outrageously. Then she paused. Again?

“Do you remember me?” he asked.

“No,” she replied honestly, unsure which of them had a memory that failed. “But the dweller speaks of you often.”

“How did you come to be here?”

“Sheer luck,” she said, easily, like he had reached down her throat and pulled the words out on a string from her chest. She couldn’t control the bitterness. “I was beset by maddened men. Hunters they call themselves. They killed my companion, but I ran through endless carnage to reach this place.”

“A terrible ordeal,” the hunter said with a strange, intense face.

She shrugged, eager to move on from the subject of her companion’s face buried in muck and mud and water; like a common stray put down. She felt nauseous just nearing the memory, so she held the book up for him to see. “I have found these books. I wish to read them, but it’s so strange,” she laughed without reason, “I can’t read a single word of this strange script.”

He did not answer for a long moment, but then he leaned down and took the book from her and shut it firmly. “Do not read this,” he said. “It’s better for you to remain shut inside for now.” There was something terrifyingly flat in his voice. She nodded, numb from shock and unease, and bit her lip.

“You always do that,” he said gesturing with the book at her face. He stared at her for a moment, but she couldn’t think of anything else to say to him. He turned away from her, tossing the book aside like it was naught but trash, and went down the stairs. He spared the woman in red a glance and disappeared through a doorway. “Don’t follow me,” his voice rang through the cathedral as his footsteps carried him further away, stirring the slumbering old woman by the arched doorway. “It’s not safe.”

She wondered how he knew she had wanted to follow him. She tiptoed down when she was certain he was gone and passed the slumbering woman. The nun watched her from the far corner of the chapel. There was something horrible in her eyes, peeking out from the dark to watch the other inhabitants of the chapel, but Ifeye ignored it and peeked outside tentatively. There were bodies in the graveyard. The hunter stood there, among them, watching her with a cold gaze.

“I told you,” he said, and it carried all the way to her in the doorway, “to stay shut inside. Do not leave. If you die, you’ll be the one responsible for the fate of every human in this city.”

Confused, frightened, and now nonsensically chastised, Ifeye turned and ran back up the steps to the dweller. She sat beside him, ignoring his flustered mutterings and shakes, and watched the moonlight filter into the stone world of the chapel.

“He’s good, a bit gruff, but he’s good. He likes you, seems like. I haven’t got a clue what he meant by the fate of every human.”

Then silence.

Hours seemed to pass before the dweller spoke again.

“You found your way here yourself, and that’s just… Well, it’s just _impressive_.” The dweller turned to her kindly. She stared at him, but he simply smiled back, vaguely terrifying and intensely gentle, soothing, and kind, and he waited for her to answer.

He seemed to chalk up her silence to discomfort, or shyness, for he smiled wider and spoke with renewed vigor. “We’re all sorts around here,” he said kindly. “You and that funny, chuckling man are our newest additions. Maybe you could introduce yourself? Your story is just so fascinating... He might like to hear it.”

Like a music box wound up, uncaring what she was responding to, Ifeye spoke. “I’d have died if fortune hadn’t favored me,” she said in a voice like a doll's; empty. She turned from him, towards the door beyond, away from the people in the chamber with her. “May I pay a visit to the library in the tomb, now that I am safe?”

“It might be dangerous,” he fussed, clearly reluctant to deny her what she wanted. “I don’t know how safe things are immediately outside the chapel here. Take incense with you, but it is not usually enough in small quantities. The hunter can’t protect us when he’s not _here_.”

She went, into the little library, wondering about that hunter, and sighed with happiness to see the familiar sight of books. She took one from the shelves, it was golden and a mundane, but calming brown, and the pages within were withered in a fond, ordinary way. She opened to the first page and read. She read three pages, then realized she had not read anything, and went back to the beginning. She stared at the book before shutting it, her head suddenly ringing. She felt a sharp pain within, all over her body, and then finally in her stomach. Ifeye lowered herself carefully to the ground, her vision going black and her breath shallow, and she pressed her head to the cool stone.

There were footsteps behind her, but she could not bear to lift her head. She felt arms around her, she felt the nausea and pain ebb away. Something terrible filled her lungs and her nose, and she coughed at the stench of it. Blood, but all wrong. Someone had lifted her from the floor, and she lay propped up against their arm, their hand pulling the scarf about her neck loose so that she could breathe. She opened her eyes. A man knelt at her side, his fingers digging into her arm and his arm around her, holding her upright.

“Why are you _here?”_ he demanded, his voice enraged for some inconceivable reason. “Ifeye, I told you to stay inside. Has the night not progressed?”

She looked at him, at the flecks of blood on what skin she could see, and she shrugged. “Who have you been killing?”

He ignored her question, and when she sat up, he let her go with a strange hesitation. “You need to go back inside. Leave these books, they mean nothing; they’re madness itself.”

“I wish to read them, I’m bored.”

“I don’t care. I said you should not.”

“Who are you to me that you can tell me what I should or should not do?” She jerked out of his grip and grabbed at the book on the floor, clutching it to her chest. “I don’t even know who you are. How do you know my name and what makes you think you can speak to me this way?”

“Go back to the chapel, leave this place.” He stood and offered her a hand, but she refused it and stood up alone. She owed him nothing; he didn’t save her, if anything she owed the dweller more respect than this arrogant hunter. His eyes did not leave her as she passed him. He was watching her like… She snorted.

“What occupies you, my lady?”

“I am not a lady; I am a maid. I am a chimney sweep in a dress.”

The hunter was watching her like a wild beast watching its prey, and she fled like prey. She reentered the chapel and went back to the kind dweller, who watched her too, but much less intensely. She smoothed out her skirts and sat beside him, carefully avoiding the candles lit around him.

“That hunter is meddlesome,” she said to him. “And his manner is rude.”

The dweller fretted over that for a time, trying to defend his friend to her. The lady in red, now feeling better apparently, vouched for the hunter in her own way. “He’s a strange, imposing man,” she said. “But he’s done us all good. We owe him our lives.”

Ifeye looked around, at the disagreeable man, at the bandaged man and the women of the place, all people the hunter guided here himself. “I don’t,” Ifeye said firmly. “I owe the dweller and the incense, maybe, my life. Why does he presume to order me around?”

The lady in red shrugged her shoulders and suddenly looked bored. “He’s strange,” she said again. “He knows more than I tell him, and he remembers more than I remember saying. He must know something we do not.”

“And you’ve simply accepted that?”

“I have greater worries,” the lady muttered, her face darkening. “My body is so weak suddenly.” She said nothing more, and the silence began again.

Ifeye sat there in the growing calm, listening to the dweller murmur prayers and the lady groan as her strange pain beset her once more. There was an unusual feeling in her skin as she sat and waited, and after a while she stood and made to return to her place by the lanterns. But something caught her eye. She turned to the strange new thing and realized that the door that had always been locked before, the one just down the steps and to the right, was open wide.

She made her way to it.

“That’s not for you,” the dweller called out. Ifeye ignored him, making her way forward. There was a wide room inside, stone walls and floors, and there, a strange device stood. She went to it and pulled, but nothing happened. She looked at the little rounded platform ahead and took a single step forward. Someone pulled her back. "Again?" she cried out, her outrage overtaking her.

She spun around, barely swallowing her scream. It was a large, imposing man, dressed all in black with his face covered and his tri-cornered hat pulled low. A hunter. The hunter himself?

“Again?” he asked, his voice low. "What do you mean when you say _again_? Do you remember?"

“Sir,” she gasped, pulling herself out of his grip and right over a ledge in the floor. She fell back, onto the platform, and a loud, mechanical noise rang out as her body pushed something down beneath her. She froze, staring at him as the platform began to rise, staring even as he broke into a run towards her. 

Several things happened very quickly. First, he leapt onto the platform and screamed as his leg became caught in the crush of the platform into the wall. There was a horrible, ripping noise, but his cry of pain was muffled as he bit into the cloth at his mouth. Ifeye, horrified and disgusted, began to weep and scream as he reached behind him to grab at something. She covered her mouth with her hands tightly as the wind ruffled her hair and her skirts, and she watched him in frozen horror as he lifted a gun to his head.

 _No,_ was her last thought. 

She blinked against the light of the candles and sat with her legs tucked neatly beneath her, observing in silence the peaceful serenity of the chapel. The night was long; she had never thought it would be this long. They had warned her, of course, when she first came here with--

When she first came here, they warned her about nights of the hunt. But the promise of treatment was too powerful, and it lured them here, to this world of long nights and strange candles, burning incense, and men slowly losing their minds in the streets.


	2. Chapter 2

The silence stretched on as she sat there, looking around, strangely calm. She was not calm this way before. She should not be, for her chest still ached and her throat was still sore. Mina was dead; had she been killed only a few hours ago? Less, even? She felt as though she was in a little boat on the waves, with a tall, dark ferryman for company. The thought was strong in her mind, she could even see the ferryman's gaze through the mist of the sea.

“You’re the only one he didn’t guide here, and isn’t that strange?”

She blinked at the dweller, her voice raw from screaming and her chest aching from running. What had she been running from? Why had she screamed? She remembered the men who killed Mina, remembered the moment she chose to turn and run as her friend fell to a gunshot that rang through the night like a crack of thunder. But something about the memory felt wrong. There was a hole in it.

Her eyes fell on the strange glow in the center of the chamber. A shadow of a glow. She had not noticed it before, but for a moment she wondered if she knew what “before” was.

“Where is the hunter?” she asked, a little distractedly, unsure what she meant but sure that she meant it.

“Oh, asking after him now, are you?” The lady leaned back in her chair and smirked, disturbingly knowingly. “Don’t bother setting your cap at that one, he’s strange through and through. Barely stops for a chat anymore. Yes, that man thinks only of his hunt. He hasn’t time for pretty girls or otherwise.”

Ifeye cleared her throat against some noise of outrage. But while she concerned herself with meeting these strange implications, the glow about the center of the dais grew stronger and shimmered. The hunter returned. He was covered in blood, but it seemed to be coming only from one side of him, and it ran in rivulets down what she could see of his face. She wondered what had happened to him, now fully distracted from the embarrassing conversation she had been having.

“What happened to you?" she asked, but he was making his way towards her with something like fear on his face, and she scrambled backwards to get away from him. He must be mad. His eyebrows, so strangely connected in the middle, were drawn sharply over his nose and his glare was no longer cold. No, it was angry and harsh. He stopped before her and did not lean down, did not do anything but look down at her.

“You are to stay _put_ ,” he rumbled, a familiar but alarming sound.

“I ask you again, sir, who do you think you are to speak to me like this?”

The hunter exhaled sharply, irritated. “You will do as I say if you want to survive the night,” he told her, and walked past her without another word. She waited until he left and then looked at the lady in red accusingly.

“He behaves this terribly all the time?” she asked her companions, but the lady shook her head.

“No, that was the worst he’s ever been. What did you do to him in that little library?”

The library? Was that the last time she had seen him? Was whatever had enraged the hunter to be found in the library? She stood and made her way to the little door, but there was a harsh clanging noise from across the chapel. She groaned and turned, somehow knowing already that he would be there, glaring at her. He was.

“If you die,” he called out, terrifyingly, “the fate of this city will be on your shoulders. Think on that, little maid.” He turned on his heel and, his strange blade at the ready, vanished into the night. Ifeye was left confused, frightened, and strangely guilty.

“How did he know I was a maid?”

“A maid?” the lady asked. “Why, I found myself in service too before I… Well, before I found another occupation.”

“What is your occupation?”

“Nothing to worry about for _you_ ,” the lady said, looking at Ifeye’s dress. “Fancy maid? Lady’s maid?”

“No,” Ifeye said, smoothing out her skirt once more and sitting beside the dweller. “Does it look to be fancy?”

“These are hard times, miss,” the dweller said, moving uncomfortably in agitation. “To be dressed clean like yourself is more telling than you might think.”

“But I am not dressed in clean clothing,” Ifeye protested. She lifted the shawl she wrapped about her shoulders and revealed a great stain of blood that was beginning to dry in the night air, and the remnants of soot that would never leave the white of the uniform dress. “You see?”

The lady looked at her for a moment, then snorted. “Be that as it may, the sun will rise, and you will go back to your rich man’s manor, and I will go back to my corner. We are not the same, little maid.”

Ifeye didn’t fully understand what had happened, but she wrapped the shawl about herself again and let the silence fall once more. She did not tell them that she would never return to that manor, that she did not know what to do, that she was set out to sea when she needed to be on the shore, waiting for someone to come back to her. She did not tell them that her mind was full of holes, like cloth left in a wardrobe too long. She had not the words to describe it.

In that uncomfortable but silent companionship, she sat and waited, and said nothing more. The hours ticked by, and then there was a rushing sound from the doorway, and she saw the nun stand quickly as the hunter reentered. He passed by her with hardly a glance and ran up the steps to the dais and stopped before Ifeye, ignoring the lady’s offended sniff.

“You,” he breathed heavily, pointing at her. He looked maddened again. “You said you were asking me _again_. And before, _before_ , you also said _again_.”

“What?” He _was_ mad. A pity, because apparently he had several terrifying, dreadful weapons strapped to his back.

“Before, just a moment—A while, ago—you said you asked me _again._ On the lift you said it, again, _again._ What do you remember of me?”

“I remember you have the manners of a boar and that you’re fond of ordering me around.”

“But what do you remember?” he asked, with something like desperation. It was hard to tell. Half his face was covered, and his eyebrows made him look very angry. "Do you remember anything of your life? The world?"

It didn’t matter to her. Ifeye shrugged, perfectly happy to see him frustrated and unhappy. “Who can know?” she hummed, avoiding an answer.

The hunter passed a hand over his eyes, smearing the blood that was still wet and dislodging horrible, dried flakes onto the floor. “Ifeye,” he said, suddenly calm. “If I have offended you, I am sorry. I did not think you would remember anything, I did not realize the night could progress this way until just recently. God, of everything, of it all, why did you remember _this_?”

Ifeye turned to the dweller, deeply confused. “Is he mad?” she asked. The dweller, apparently horrified that she would ask, stuttered out denials until the hunter cut through them.

“Let me begin again,” the hunter muttered, quietly, but effectively silencing them all like blows to the head. “God, why did the night have to progress _now?”_ he asked himself again, incomprehensibly. He knelt before her and held out his hand, palm up. She stared at it and then looked at him.

“I haven’t got any more books,” she said flatly, the memory of a similar interaction rising a little to the surface of her thoughts. “You have confiscated them all.”

He grumbled something that sounded rude, but she could not make it out. She flinched only a little when he leaned over, took her hand, and pulled down the cloth that obscured his lips to kiss the back of her hand. Distantly, she thought that he had done the leaning and taking out of order. He was no nobleman, but then she was no lady. His head was tilted forward, so she could not see his face, but she found herself wanting to lean over and take a peek. She'd never seen the rest of his face, not to her, admittedly in question memory. Though, his sanity was also in question. 

“My dear Ifeye, I am but a humble hunter devoted to keeping you alive, please do not fear me.”

“I don’t fear you!” Ifeye snapped in embarrassment. She yanked her hand back and rubbed the feeling of the kiss away. “Why are you behaving this way?”

“I’m trying to fix it,” he muttered. “Fine. I’ll be right back.” She watched in confusion as he turned around and seemed to simply disappear. Her eyes felt like they were itching, but it could not be denied. He had been there, and now he was gone. It felt like reading the books. It felt like trying to remember Mina, who died, who had been killed in the muddy streets like nothing.

She stared at the spot he had been and did not move for a long time, feeling more than ever that the world was large and dark and that this particular night was too long.

The world shifted as the glow in the center of the dais faded again, to a normal color. She blinked, fighting the feeling, because it was the same feeling from all those times before, but before she could brace herself to fight it fully, with all her strength, the world disappeared in fog.

She was thinking about a boat on the ocean, a ferryman, and the spray of the sea when the hunter came to her and kneeled on the floor before her, holding a hand to receive her own, like good gentlemen did for great ladies with grand titles. “My lady,” he said.

“I’m no lady,” she protested, blushing despite herself. “I’m a maid.” He did not move, so she hesitantly let her hand drop into his. He pulled down the cloth that obscured his face and revealed a mouth deeply scarred, almost deformed. She flinched a little, taken aback, and he hesitated over her hand, before releasing it so that it lay limply atop his own. She could pull it back; he was silently telling her that she could if she wished. “My apologies,” she mumbled, ashamed. “I was only surprised.”

He kissed her hand quickly and hid his face once more. He seemed determined to hide his face from her. He was certainly not handsome, she thought. But oddly courteous. And familiar. If his scars were nobly won, he ought to be proud of them, right?

Then she remembered the library.

“Why have you forbidden me from the library? Why do you behave in such a confusing way?”

The hunter stood; his gaze lowered. “I would not forbid you anything, if I could help it,” he said warmly. “But the library is unsafe, and until I can block the trapdoor sufficiently it will remain unsafe and thus forbidden to you.”

“You should go block the trapdoor, then,” she told him. “I am bored. It’s been hours since I’ve arrived here.”

“Yes,” he said, like he was laughing without laughing. “It has been several long hours. I will find you books and bring them here. Please wait patiently, Ifeye.”

He left, somehow. Her mind obscured how it was that he approached and disappeared beyond the strange light in the center of the dais. She stared after it for a moment and then remembered the strange door that had opened up just over there, just beyond the dais. She hadn't had a chance to--

When had she noticed it before? Her mind ached a little when she tried to remember, so she put that aside. She would go inspect it before he could come back, he’d never know. She stood and walked over, ignoring the muttered, anxious protests of the dweller and the dark cackle of the bandaged man with the harsh gaze.

The door led to a platform and a strange mechanical device. She pulled it, and something loud began to clank. The platform beyond was strangely stained. She approached it, tentatively, terrified of it in a deep, ancient way. There was blood on the marble. It pooled horribly, freshly spilt. It was cold, yet still liquid, although it coagulated in places. She looked at it for a moment before she remembered the hunter and the books.

Turning away, she abandoned the strange sight and returned to one person: the dweller, who peered through the balustrade and watched her approach with something like fear in his eyes.

“You ought to stay near,” he trembled. “I don’t like seeing the hunter scared.”

“Scared?”

“You seem to frighten him a lot when you run off, just stay here. Nice and calm, like.”

Ifeye considered this, a little distrustful of the dweller’s ability to read the hunter. “I don’t think he’s frightened,” she argued, as gently as she could.

_If you die, you’ll be the one responsible for the fate of every human in this city._

She looked over to the woman in red, doubled over and groaning once more, and the poor old woman muttering to herself in perpetual irritation. What on earth had she to do with them? Nothing. She had nothing, anyway. She wished she could tell someone about this dreadful emptiness. She felt like a child's drawing of herself; things were missing in all the details. Her mind was full of holes. Nothing to fill them. What did the faithful here chant so often?

What did they say in their church services? _Grant us eyes_. She laughed aloud, and went up the stairs. "My mind is so full of holes, you might as well fill them with eyes," she said. The dweller fretted about her sudden dark mood, but she could not alleviate his fear. Her guilt rose with her sadness, so replete with emptiness was she, that she felt the world itself was becoming flat around her. 

“What happens if I die?” she asked as the world seemed to stretch and swirl around her, and the strange, laughing man's chuckles and the lady in red’s groans pushed against her mind. She was cold, and hungry, and tired, and if she could just make it to the tombs, she was sure there would be hunters there who might be yet reasoned with. Men who might not attack her, who might give her food to eat.

Then there was a sound behind her, and she turned, the world falling back into place and time coming back to itself, to see the hunter.

“I’ve been here hours, and all I have are these few books. Please, won’t you bring me _something_ to do?”

“You want something to do? I brought you new books.”

“I grow weary,” she said, ignoring him. She wanted to go outside.

“It has only been a few hours,” he says, again, in a strangely fond but secret voice, adjusting some strap on his leg. The way he spoke, familiarly, intimately, when he had no right to be... It should have upset her, but it only made her feel less like cloth and paper.

“I am tired as though I have not slept in months,” she said. "Though it has only been a few hours." She wondered if she could tell him about her headaches, about the emptiness in her mind, about the holes. Maybe he would understand. The hunter stood and shouldered his enormous weapon, but it did not scare her. He would not harm her, this she knew well, somehow. Something like an echo in her mind told her to worry not. He looked at her, from his height and from behind the shadow of his hat and said something interesting.

"Tell me about yourself."

"I--" she paused. She wanted to. "I am a maid."

"Anything else I should know?"

"I like to read."

"These are all things I know," he pointed out. So she bit her lip and tried again to find something new, something about herself to share.

"My mind has holes in it," she said. "I do not belong here."

The hunter looked at her for a long time, his gaze sad. "No," he said. "No, you do not belong here. But neither do I."

"Do you feel this too?"

"No," he said again. "I have my memories, and myself. You've lost yours."

Ifeye pondered this. "How do you know? Is this because you seem to know me? Do you know me?"

"I do," he said, something like hope brightening his eyes. She wished she could see his smile; she knew he was smiling. “You’ve stopped shouting at me,” he said, still fondly.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know… My memory is—” she shrugged helplessly and gave up trying to explain the vortex in her thoughts every time he was near, every single time she tried to remember, or think, or read.

“Better shouting than dead," he said in a darkly knowing tone. "I’ve seen worse.”

She shrugged again, unable to respond. This strange hunter, with his odd turns in conversation and his overly familiar attitude, put her out of rhythm. Of course, it was hard to have a rhythm after what had happened to her. And it was hard to fall into a rhythm that she could not fully remember.

What had happened to her? Throwing her mind back to earlier that night (was it only hours ago?), she remembered the men, clumsy and awful, and loud, with horrible blades at the ready, and she remembered the smell of blood. Then a broad back, another gunshot, a hunter on his knees with someone reaching deep into his chest. She looked down to her chest, moving the shawl aside. Yes, there it was. The blood in the linen. Had she been shot too? No, there was no pain. And she was alive.

How had the blood gotten there? She remembered Mina falling to the gunshot, directly to the ground. She did not remember holding her, or any blood. It did not look like it had come through her skin; it looked like it had been pressed into her. 

"Why have I blood here?"

The hunter seemed to pause. "That would be my fault," he said simply. "When I saw you first--"

"I don't remember that," she interrupted him, speaking faintly. The hunter shifted, and suddenly she realized there was a world around them. "Nevermind," she said. "My head hurts again." She went to her corner slowly, and he came up behind her, hovering around and generally acting confusingly distressed and worried. She felt guilty for worrying him, and she felt strange for not wanting to hear about their first meeting. She ought to remember it; was it not in the library? Was it before-- Her head hurt again, worse, pounding. She sighed and leaned forward, hitting something cool and hard. The hunter. He brought his hands up to her shoulders and squeezed lightly, before seeming to give in, because his arms came around her.

“You don’t remember?”

She kept her eyes shut tightly against the pain, but there was something sad in his voice as he spoke. She could not place it exactly, but she knew that he was disappointed. “I remember you there," she said. "When Mina died. But my mind does not want me to. My mind _hates_ the memory of you."

"It's not your mind," he says in a voice like sorrow. "It's not _you."_

“I am waiting for someone,” she said, without knowing why. She lifted her head to look at him, stepping away from his arms, something in her memories thinking about the one she waited for. "Only I do not know who it is. Is it you?"

He looked at her, the drawn expression now smoothed out in surprise. She was getting rather used to his habits. “What else do you remember? Why would you ask that?”

A fog settled. “Ask what?” she asked. “I’m not sure what I said.”

“Never mind then, my lady.”

“I’m no lady; I’m just a maid.”

He ignored this declaration. “Don’t go out tonight,” he said firmly, in familiar sternness. “The hunt is long, but the night is longer. Stay here, stay hidden.”

"Where are you going? Why do you not just stay here?"

"A hunter needs to hunt," he said. "I go to the Byrgenwerth college. Answers await me there."

"Answers to what?"

"Ending this night," he replied. "I want this night to end."

"Why do you come back here so often?"

"To see you," he said. "To make sure you are not dead."

"You said something before," she ventured, "something about the fate of every human in this city, should I die."

"If you die, I will stop hunting. I will damn Yharnam to hell."

"Oh. So, the fate of every human is in _your_ hands."

His gaze was empty as he looked at her, but she saw in him something like resignation and even a fond warmth that she had grown to expect. "Yes," he said, "the fate of Yharnam is in my hands. Perhaps."

He turned to the center of the dais, but she spied something on his coat, something like a snakeskin, clinging to the back. He was covered in blood, dust, and dirt, but that thing had been so close to her just now, when he had comforted her. Something about that terrified her.

She reached out to take it as he went, and he turned back to look at her when he reached the little lamp that was always there, dim and unlit and strange. She hid the strange snakeskin behind her back, hastily, and smiled at him.

Oh, but she had only just noticed the lamp. She had never seen it before. Why did it feel as though she had? She stared at it, transfixed, as something danced about in its light. Beautiful, horrifying, and somehow it had always been there. The glow had been a lamp. The feeling was back, the feeling of expectation, and then her mind went back to the snakeskin and she turned away, back to her corner. When she looked up again, the hunter was gone.

The skin was still in her hand, clutched loosely, but then it began to squirm in a strange way, and it gained a fullness that was not hollow. She dropped it with a disgusted, horrified cry. Was it a snake?

Like the world coming back together after a dream, the dweller cried out too.

“What on earth is the matter?” he called out. The woman in red (how had she forgotten her?), groaned too, far away. She sounded more ill than she ever had before.

Ifeye looked at the skin and leaned over to take it in hand again. It was not a snakeskin. It was stronger than that. It had the imprint of texture in it, and tendrils of something yet moving as though in a breeze. Something about it was all wrong.

She held it still for a while, but then it came alive in her grasp and quivered. Gasping in horror for a scream that did not come, she dropped it once more and stared as it squirmed and twisted its way over to the red woman. With barely a thought to what she was doing, Ifeye leapt after it, diving into the marble floor to catch it before it reached Arianna. The woman in red’s name was Arianna; the memory hit her suddenly with the force of a wave in the ocean. The memory of an ocean hit her as well, a man smiling at her and speaking over the gray roar of the waves; his smile was awkward somehow, but happy, beloved.

The ocean. She was waiting for someone on the shore. She reached for the thing, the memory coming clearer as she held it, but the pain in her mind grew unbearable too. She made the decision quickly, drawing the line between memory and pain. She ran for the doorway to the graves, the ones beyond the old woman. Ifeye gripped the thing in her fist tightly, one last time, and threw it far away, disgusted beyond words, and aching all over her body. Her mind calmed when it was gone. The aching was getting worse, especially in her head. It grew to be unbearable.

She got off the floor and ran to grab a candle from the candelabra by the balustrade and cast it about in terror. The wax ran onto her hand, burning her, but she could not stop. The thing, whatever it was, was terror like she’d never known terror. It was horror like she didn’t know horror could be, and she _knew_ horror. She knew fear. Her husband's long illness, Mina's death; she remembered fear now. She watched her friend fall into the sea of horrible, staring, _beast-like_ faces and she saw the blood— She had watched her husband, dying, a skeleton; even his beloved, intense gaze glassy as he breathed weakly – her head pounded harder and she struggled to keep her eyes open, looking with every eye blazing into the dark.

For it felt like she was covered in eyes, all awake, all alert, all looking inwards.

She stared into the dark for a long time, making sure the thing was indeed gone, knowing that the strange nun and the strange old woman and the two angry men all watched her in confusion and suspicion. They’d never understand. She leapt from the darkness below to the stairs, and went back to her place on the dais.

The night returned to its false serenity, though her heart still pounded. She could not return to her quiet contemplations, her mind spinning with memory and half-thought realization. She sat in silence, ignoring the curious gazes of the others, and as she did the delicate blue of the moon’s light transformed. This was familiar. 

Her heart pounding, the serenity of the chapel and its flickering candles, only this time, her mind was all together. The thing had brought back her memory.

She opened her eyes as the others in the chapel stirred in confusion. Blood—everywhere.

“The moon,” the dweller’s voice gasped. “The moon has changed. What could it mean?” 

Ifeye went to the balustrade by the lady in red, and looked to the doorway, where the graves were. There, like in a dream, she saw a large, dark, mottled hand descend, reach out, and press into the earth. She watched it retreat back into the sky after a moment.

There was something on the roof of the chapel, she realized. She had thrown the squirming thing out _there_. 

The lady in red groaned and doubled over again, somewhere beside her, but Ifeye stared at the red moonlight on the floor without moving, without breathing. One of the mean men laughed, darkly, cackling in the dark. She felt sudden terror at the sound of his laughter, like it wasn’t quite human.

The moonlight, like the flame from a torch, or a burning beast, had destroyed the brief, mortal serenity of the chapel.

“The hunter,” Adella the nun gasped. “I hope he is safe. I pray for him so,” she crooned from her corner.

“What has the hunter to do with the moon?” a voice cackled. “You’d think you’d see through those old stories, after tonight. No, the moon has nothing to do with that hunter.”

“Well, well,” another voice intoned, deep and forbidding. Wrong. "He smells of moonlight, haven't any of you noticed? It's about time someone--"

Ifeye, her eyes on the light of the moon— still red like blood— did not say a word to anyone.

The door beyond the light beckoned, and inside she could see blood pooling by a strange device, a horrible mechanism by the elevator. It filled her with terror, but she went, while everyone was busy exclaiming prayers and wishes, and she left them all behind.

There was something on the roof. And something like it had been here, in her hand, squirming. It had opened her mind, briefly, and it had changed her. Her memory was less full of holes now, like there really were eyes inside. She remembered—

Her husband. Mina. The Mob. The hunter—why had they attacked her and Mina? The hunter had been there, she remembered that, but why had the hunter been there so quickly? Why had she run, without waiting a moment, obeying the order to flee? Was it truly all coincidence?

The elevator lead to a strange, open place. There was a man in the corner, muttering over a large gun and snoring a little. His eyes were bound in that manner that was particular to Yharnam's strange, aging population. She tiptoed past him, passing beneath strange devices and weapons hanging from the ceiling, to an open doorway that brought her to a steep drop and the sight of the whole city spread out about her.

There was a narrow bridge and a man staring into space in the corner. She approached slowly. From there she might be able to see the roof without alerting the thing atop it.

“Hark! A—it’s a girl. Look, a girl! You there! Girl!” She looked up to see ugly-looking men with large hats and large guns aiming at her. She tried to speak, but she could not say a word, let alone shout out to them. “Girl!” they cried, their voices like gravel in dirt. “You can’t be about here, there’s a hunt afoot! Beasts about! Go back inside! There’s a sneaky fellow about, too—Evil outsider.”

“He’s not evil!” she cried, her voice cracking on the words as she finally gathered the courage to shout. “He’s saved my life!”

“Oh, what’s this?” a man on the bridge cackled, and his sword caught the light terribly. She shuddered. They were beasts. Uncouth and dishonorable. She’d best go back. “She’s an outsider, too. Did you hear that? She speaks like _them_. She looks like them too. Been in the sun a while, outsider? Or are you the little beast that brought the others here?”

“Please,” she pleaded, suddenly terribly sure of why Mina had died. “I have only a wish to see my old mother,” she lied, and thought that if she could just turn her back on these men and run, she would be safe. But before she could plan a way towards that end, a shot that rang out and tore through her ears almost painfully. She cried out and tried to run away from it, perhaps back towards the lift, but something took hold of her and dragged her backwards before she could. She saw someone shove the man with the sword over the edge of the bridge and pulled her backwards, shoving her roughly into the first room, and cries of “Don’t shoot! The girl--!” and “Who gives a damn! She's the same as him! Shoot!” followed her into the darkness.

The hunter, for it was the hunter, then turned back with his blade out and ready still. He waited, but there was only silence. The horrible men had elected, for whatever reason, not to pursue them here. She almost laughed with relief, but she froze when the hunter looked back at her. He was very angry, but his eyes were wild in a way that spoke to fear. She’d never seen a man look so... wild.

“I’m sorry,” she gasped, her hands out to try and calm him. She didn't know why, but she could practically hear his heartbeat like a roar in her ears. “I didn’t mean to put myself in danger. I really just wanted to see—”

He seemed to freeze, staring at her, his previous fear abandoned suddenly. “Do you remember our last conversation?”

“Yes,” she said.

“How?” He looked to the sky, where the moon shone red and bloody in the night. “Right. That vapid spider changed something. Is anything clearer now than it was?” She watched him suspiciously. How had he known her mind had begun to clear? Was her confusion that apparent? It never became clear what had done it, but his eyes narrowed above his mask. “Follow me,” he said with a tone like flippancy, and took her wrist and pulled her towards the lift. She followed, without protest, if only because the way he had said that was a little familiar.

“Might as well,” she thought. “He might be mad, and a little strange, but he has saved my life and the dweller spoke highly of him.” There was another reason to trust him, it was hitting at her skull with little fists, but she couldn’t think of it right that moment. The lift whirred and hummed as they went back down and left the strange room and returned to the main chamber of the chapel. It was strange to think of this place in such familiar terms but following the hunter as he took her back to her place by the little lanterns felt familiar. As they walked into the chapel, she noticed that the old lady was no longer seated in her place by the great doorway overlooking the graves.

She was about to ask where the lady had gone, but the hunter merely led her to the dweller, who seemed to unravel into a puddle on his mat. Adella was beside him, gravely holding his hand in comfort. “Oh, thank the Gods,” he wept. “I was beside meself, Miss. Don’t run off like that again. Didn’t I tell ya it’s dangerous out there?”

She knelt beside the strange puddle of sobs that was the dweller and gathered his other hand in hers gently. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Please do not cry. I was wrong to leave like that; I was being selfish.” The hunter scoffed and merely shrugged when she turned to glare at him. Electing to let that go, Ifeye returned her attention to the dweller. “There now, tell me what has happened? Are all these tears for me?”

“The old bird is just gone!” the dweller cried out, sobs returning. “First you were gone, then I turned to look, and she was gone too!”

“It gets worse,” the hunter muttered. “The rude man is gone as well; his place is bloody and empty. It’s no longer safe here.” Ifeye met Adella's gaze, and the nun nodded in agreement.

“What do we do?” Ifeye asked. The hunter looked between her and Adella.

“Have neither of you noticed anything else?”

Ifeye looked around, wondering what he could mean. Besides the old lady’s empty space, and the strange disagreeable man’s absence, all was as it was. Except—

“The lady in red!”

“The lady in--? Oh!” the dweller brought his hands to his face in horror. “Oh, no. Oh, how did we not notice?”

Adella said nothing, but Ifeye noticed something just as she was about to ask Adella what had happened to Arianna. “There’s a trail of water here,” Ifeye said, realizing that it led to the door, far over there. She stood and began to follow the trail, but again the hunter caught her shoulder and pulled her back. She turned to look at him, past the point of protest.

The hunter removed his hand from her shoulder, watching her with a calculating eye. "You cannot just go after her alone. You will follow my instructions exactly, and you will be safe.”

"What are your instructions?" The dweller asked readily, wringing his hands, but Adella only sat in stony silence, watching them all closely.

“I am certain the beast that has killed our companions is just outside. I am going to go kill it, but to do that I need you to be far away from the battle, and safely locked away from it."

“Where should we go?” the dweller asked, shaking. The hunter looked at Ifeye, then to Adella. Something like a warning lay in his gaze.

“Our friend is nearly blind, and he needs you to guide him,” the hunter said in a blunt voice. “He cannot go far, so take him to the library. Bar the door with anything you can find. When I knock five times, ask me something only you and I could know. Move quickly as soon as you begin to leave, _he'll_ know we're on to him immediately.”

Ifeye, seized with the same purpose that drove her to the edges of the chapel itself, took the dweller’s hands and helped him stand. She did not wait for Adella, assuming she would be right behind then, so she guided the dweller towards the doors. As she did so, a horrible ripping sound began just beyond the dais. The hunter leapt away, his back to them both as they moved as quickly as they could, with the dweller’s pace, to the door to the library.

There was crashing, a sound like a blade hitting flesh, and then someone joined them, pushing them forwards faster than they were capable of moving. The library doors opened, and Adella, the soft-spoken nun, pushed them forwards and into the library. She followed them shortly after, shutting the door with a panicked cry of exertion.

“That was a beast like none I have ever seen,” Adella gasped, eyes wide. Her frame shook, like a leaf upon a tree’s branches, but Ifeye saw steel in her gaze. An ancient hatred gave the nun strength, and Ifeye watched as Adella stood at the door, eyes like flames, a candelabra in hand as though it were a sword. Ifeye saw all this as she gathered the dweller from the floor and helped him sit in a chair. He seemed very small, here in this tiny library.

“How did a beast get past the incense?” Ifeye asked, her voice numb and blank even to her own ears. “It’s meant to be safe here.”

The dweller moaned, weeping, and covered his face. Ifeye held him tightly as he shook on the floor. “It was the rude man,” Adella said, from her place by the door. “I saw him change. I left my knife in his eye."

"Why didn't you say anything?"

Adella shrugged. Ifeye watched her for a long moment, realizing that she had heard the man's terrible laughter and felt his awful eyes, and known that something inside her had known he was not ordinary. Adella began to move chairs before the door, and she took candle sticks and forced them between the handles to bar any entry. 

“He looked to be a human,” the dweller whispered, his gaze on nothing. “He was… in possession of himself, somehow. I have never heard of that happening. Have you?”

Adella did not answer, but she stopped her work and stood before the door, waiting. The sounds stopped after a sick, wrenching echo filled their ears and forced Ifeye to swallow down and brace her mind against the steady, growing fear that the hunter had died. She extracted herself from the dweller’s arms and went to stand beside Adella.

Five knocks came through the door, and Adella tensed beside her. Ifeye held up a hand and stepped forward. “What did you tell me to guide me to this chapel?”

There was silence. Then a familiar huff of breath, like an almost-laugh. “Nothing,” the hunter said. “You ran off and found it yourself.”

Ifeye opened the door for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I struggled a lot to keep the flow of information limited to what Ifeye knows and remembers at given times and events. It was fun to experiment :>


	3. Chapter 3

The hunter smiled as he entered the little library, and he looked so warm and happy to see her that she smiled back, recalling his strange episodes of fond kindness, in between his panic and stern fear.

“Is it safe to go back?”

The hunter looked at the dweller sadly, and Ifeye could read in his face how he felt to hear the dweller ask such a thing. He looked regretful, like it truly pained him to tell the dweller that he could not return yet. “I will go back perhaps to find more incense, to bide us time,” the hunter said. “Until then, I do not think it is safe to return there. I have surrounded the door with incense for the moment, but even then—Even here it is not safe.”

“The trapdoor,” Ifeye realized, remembering the hunter’s reasoning when he had forbidden her from returning to the library. “It’s unsecured.”

“Exactly,” he said with a sigh. “I cannot even guarantee your safety here, Ifeye.”

“What shall we do?” Adella said, a dark look creeping onto her face. Ifeye reached out to hold the nun’s gloved hand tightly, but in return all she received was a look of deep distrust.

“We will find a way to keep safe,” Ifeye said as kindly as she could. “There’s always a way.”

The hunter left them there for what felt like hours, but strange things happened during that time. The dweller’s gaze became affixed to the trapdoor, and so did Adella’s. Ifeye felt like the world had been swapped over when the new moon rose. It had been her duty before to look longingly at doors she could not pass through safely, but now she held them back and watched them suspiciously when they gazed at the trapdoor too closely.

“What do you see? What is so fascinating about that?” she asked. The dweller did not answer, but in the silence something became clear. They were intent. Adella was leaning forward minutely, as though anticipating something, so Ifeye listened and watched too. She heard it, when she thought to hear it, and soon she was gazing at the trapdoor with single-minded focus too.

“There’s the sound of weeping,” she gasped.

“You hear it too?” Adella clenched a single fist into her robes. “I thought I had gone mad.”

“I do,” Ifeye whispered. “Shall we—Shall I go?”

“No,” Adella said. “No, I shall. I believe—” She shook her head. “Stay here,” she said firmly, instead.

Ifeye thought to protest, truly, but something caught her attention now that she was not staring at her two companions in confusion and horror. The trail of water that she had noticed before; it was here. It went down the stairs, into the library, and then it lead to the trapdoor that Adella disappeared into. 

Suddenly realizing who was sure to be down there, weeping, she stood. “Stay here,” she told the dweller, who moaned and began to pray. She followed Adella down into the darkness, the light of the library disappearing from above her as she descended. “Adella,” she whispered into the darkness and the still water of the basement. But there was no answer. She continued down the ladder, nervous, cursing herself for not bringing something that could be used as a weapon.

“Oh, oh—” A sound came from below, and it sounded like it echoed.

She went down, further, into the dark. “Adella?” And it truly was Adella, standing over a prone figure slumped over in a chair.

“Oh,” Adella said again, but calmly. “Ifeye. I did not wish for you to see this. I had suspected, you see, that she was cursed so.”

“Cursed—Adella, what is going on? Is that Arianna? What has happened to her?”

“You don’t understand, and that’s only to be expected. Unopened are your eyes,” Adella said. “I had to save her this way."

Ifeye pressed forward slowly, the water on the ground up to her ankles. She shuddered when she realized that the water was becoming steadily darker and more cloudy as she neared Arianna's body and Adella herself. “What have you done?”

“What needed to be done. Now, to kill the beast as well.” Ifeye gasped at this proclamation, looking around in horror and backing up to the ladder again, waiting for a beast to show itself. But none did. Her eyes drifted to Adella, then followed her gaze to the ground. In the water there was—

“A child?”

“Look closely, may your eyes be opened. That is no child!”

“It’s—” Ifeye looked more closely, trying to see what Adella meant, but it was a child. Adella raised her knife high, and Ifeye screamed, running forwards, knocking her over. The knife flew into the air, glinting in the weak light, and fell somewhere beyond them into the water. “That is a _child!”_

“I wish, almost, that I had not been chosen, that I could look upon that _beast_ and see what you see. Give me the knife.”

She thought Ifeye had the knife. _Good_ , she thought wildly. “No,” Ifeye gasped. She darted forward and gathered the child in her arms. It hurt. Oh—

“See?” Adella laughed, pulling herself up against the wall. “Put the beast down, Ifeye. Come away from there. Let me help you.”

“No,” Ifeye fought to keep her eyes open, fighting pain as she held the child in her arms. With Arianna’s corpse lying still and solid between them, the two women stared each other down as best they could. Adella fighting to see in the dark, and Ifeye fighting to stay strong against the pain. She held the child closer to her chest, and then something changed. 

First, it sank teeth into her neck, with too many teeth and mouths, more than she had seen in its little face. Then, as she slapped her hand onto her neck with a cry of pain and looked down at it in shock, she _saw_.

“Ifeye—” There was someone calling her name. She opened her eyes and realized her arms were empty.

“The child--!”

“Forget the child,” the hunter frowned, his gaze on hers and his mask pulled down. His frown looked much more intense that way, but now that she saw his scars, somehow familiar, she felt that it was a friendly intensity. _He’s very worried_ , she thought. _A good man. But a rude one._

“I will not forget the child,” she hissed, and turned her head to look around for the little thing. Her gaze landed first on the dweller, slumbering peacefully in his chair, mumbling a little in his sleep, before moving away and down to the ground. The memory of the child’s face returned, just as her gaze landed upon it in the corner of the libary. “Oh.”

“Yes.”

“You let it live,” she said, hushed. “I thought—”

“You would never have forgiven me.”

She nodded. It was true, it would have been an unforgivable thing to kill it, just because it bit her, just because it looked like that. For it looked more clearly wrong now. It had no legs, no human eyes, no soft baby skin; it looked like a grub. Like something she’d have dug out of the garden, clinging to an unearthed carrot or root. Something at the bottom of a log, under the soil. Something in the stomach of a fish gutted for dinner. It wasn’t that terrifying, the more she looked at it. The more it fumbled about on the ground, unaware of where to turn next, almost running into a table’s leg, the more it looked and seemed like a child. She rose from the chair the hunter had deposited her into and redirected the thing so that it did not bump its little head. It looked up at her with four, strange, moon-like eyes. “How ugly,” she whispered in hushed reverence, reaching out to touch a strange tendril on its head. It looked familiar; where had she seen something so inky black and snake-like before?

“It’s an infant Great One,” the hunter said, and she did not understand what that meant. “I did not so much let it live as I did go through hell to save it. Adella was intent on killing the thing.”

Oh, Adella. Adella was still out there. She looked at the massive trapdoor, shut over the ladder that had been there, shut like it had been when she first stepped into the library. “Where is she?”

“Down there,” he said. “Hopefully when the night is over, her sense will return to her. But she might not be able to face what she’s done; she killed Arianna in cold blood tonight.”

Ifeye shut her eyes as the memory of Arianna's body overwhelmed her. “She was not herself.”

“It was a long time coming. I knew Adella hated her, but not this much.”

Ifeye thought of the way Adella would watch Arianna sometimes, when she thought no one could see. Was that hatred? It had looked like an obsession to Ifeye’s eyes. “No," she said. "I think something’s happening.” She looked at the little thing on the ground, finding its way back to the table leg with purpose. “I think things have been changing since the moon changed. I've changed too,” she said.

The hunter did not respond, but he realigned the creature with his foot, hissing as something seemed to happen to him when he did. He shook his foot out with a deep frown visible below his hat and stared at the little thing. “It didn’t do that to you?”

She looked between the little child and the hunter. “Do what?”

“It did not shock you? Or... It did not hurt you to touch it?”

“It did at first.” She thought back to when she had redirected it away from the table without a moment's fear for her body or what touching it might do to her. It had hurt her before, down in the flooded tombs, but now— “Not anymore,” she said simply. “Though it looked like an ordinary baby before, to me. How did you get it up here?”

“You wouldn’t let go of it," the hunter said in a voice that sounded like he was smiling, so she looked up from the child to see that he was. "I simply carried you, and then when I brought you to rest in the chair, it crawled down to the floor.”

“You did not touch it at all?”

“Didn’t want to, frankly. Now that you see it, you can understand why, I’m sure.”

“But it bit me!” She lifted a hand to her neck, looking for the wound. “You did not feel that you ought to protect me?” His eyes grew worried and drawn, like what she had said genuinely hurt him, and he shook his head rapidly.

“I did not know; I didn’t see—If I had known—”

Ifeye took her hand from her neck, looking at her palm to see if anything showed. There was nothing there. Her head felt strange, and her neck was stiff, but there was no sign it had bitten her. “Why did I—What made me faint, then?”

“I thought it was simply that Adella had frightened you. Or that the thing had—That seeing overwhelmed you. Although… You have never been so easy to faint, before.”

“Before?”

The Hunter nodded absently and leaned down to inspect the thing. _The child,_ she supposed. _It really looks and acts like a little child, and it is just a baby. And I nearly forgot in all the madness: he remembers me, from another time._

“How do we know that it was not this thing that killed Arianna?” she asked. The Hunter looked up at her from his place beside the child, and then he moved to bring something out of his coat. It was… a strange thing, long and twisting. “What is that?”

“The thing’s umbilical cord. Arianna gave birth to this.”

The horror of the realization took a moment to settle in; it was almost unthinkable. But then, after the horror, it seemed… entirely ordinary. “How—?” she began to ask, but then she remembered the sickness that had come over Arianna, her weakness, the way that she seemed to grow more and more ill as the moon rose. “Oh, no. How could she beget such a child? It can't be possible.”

“It’s possible, because it has happened. Adella knew what had happened immediately; I have no doubt that the Healing Church never wasted a moment, instructing her on how to dispatch monsters.”

“Arianna was no monster. How could this have happened? How is it _possible?”_

“She wasn’t a monster, but her blood, when I did receive it, was unmistakably powerful. And she was never a blood saint.” He put the cord away and patted the spot it took in his coat. “I have encountered these cords before, and blood like hers too.”

“I can’t help but wonder if I could have saved her,” Ifeye muttered. “If I had gone down first, before Adella.”

“You had no way of knowing," the hunter said quietly. "Adella has her own hardships to face, and you have yours.”

Ifeye looked at the little child, now crawling over to a book and tugging on the cover in glee. “I suppose I do. My memories are returning, just like you said.”

“But not all of them,” he said. “We should go.”

“Where to?”

“I know of a place that is safe, safer even than this chapel. It’s hidden away, not far from here. I will clear the path for us, but I need you to stay here until I return, safe in this room. I don’t think we should wake our friend here yet.”

Ifeye’s eyes drifted to the sleeping form of the dweller. “Adella is still in the tomb.”

“She would not hurt you,” the hunter said, but he eyed the trapdoor warily.

“She might not want to,” Ifeye conceded, “but I don’t trust whatever it is the Church does to its nuns.”

The hunter seemed to hesitate, but after a moment it was clear that he had come to a decision. He walked over to one of the bookshelves and pulled it until it slid over the trapdoor. “There,” he muttered, satisfied with his work. “Stay here, out of sight, and do _not_ wander off.”

“I won’t. Couldn't you have done that before?”

"That bookshelf'll keep no beast out," he said solemnly. "But it may dissuade a nun. Do I have your word that you will remain here?"

"You do," Ifeye promised. "I swear I'll stay."

He pulled the mask up, hiding the scars and his familiar face. By the time the mask was up, he was familiar only in the way the hunter always seemed to be. Because she knew him from the chapel. “You have wandered off at _every_ opportunity thus far," he said in a voice like dry stone. "You have not once, not even _once_ , stayed in one place.”

Ifeye shrugged, unable and unwilling to argue that point. “I will stay here to protect the child,” she said. “I’ll stay with the dweller and the child until you return.” His eyes narrowed in that familiar way over his mask, but in the end he relented.

“Remember what I told you,” he said.

“Stay here, out of sight, and do not wander off. I have understood.”

“If you die,” he came to stand in front of her, towering and intense, “it will be you who is responsible for what happens to this city. The fate of it rests in your hands. Do you understand?”

“You’ve said that before,” she said, looking up at him. His eyes were still unreadable, but she saw his eyebrows drawn together in the way she understood, a familiar expression. Not anger; worry.

“I meant it. If you die out there, because of some _pointless_ insatiable curiosity, I am going to go back to _there_ ,” he pointed vaguely towards the door to the chapel, “and I am not coming back. This night will carry on forever.”

“You have duties to attend to as a hunter,” she reminded him, "regardless of what a lady’s maid you’ve known one night does or does not do. Your duties are the same.”

“I’m no hunter,” the hunter said. “I’m a husband and a fisherman.”

Ifeye blinked, the memory of the ocean rising briefly like a wave to her eyes. “How did a fisherman end up a hunter?”

“Incurable illness. Misfortune. Poor judgment.” He gave one last glance to the trapdoor, covered by the bookshelf, and the little creature now entertaining itself with the books that had fallen off the shelves. “I would do it again. But I am no true hunter.” He left, the door to the library shutting behind him. Then, it was just Ifeye, the dweller, and the child in the room, and somewhere below there was Adella, alone with Arianna’s corpse.

The dweller slumbered fitfully, crying out on occasion, and the great clock above the city chimed. She could hear it, even here, and she could hear footsteps in the water below. Everything echoed, everything reverberated in the walls and in the stone floor. The books seemed to vibrate too, and she remembered the way the letters had seemed to run from her eyes as she tried to read them. She had not the heart to try again, terrified of what she might not be able to read, so she watched the child crawl clumsily about the floor, and rubbed at her neck absently.

The hunter returned, after the not-silence grew to be almost unbearable, and he gathered the sleeping dweller up in his arms. “The way is clear,” he said, jerking his head towards the door. “Can you take the child?”

She picked up the little thing, now squirming fitfully, and felt a dull throbbing in her neck. There was no true pain, however, so she followed him without pause. The door shut behind them, and they went into the sudden dark of the chapel. The dweller stirred as they went, his mumbling starting up again, but he did not wake. Not even when the elevator clunked and whirred as it lifted them up towards that tower, where there were no loud, rude men awaiting them. She remembered the last time she had thought to come here, she had wanted a better view of the thing on the roof of the chapel. Turning, ignoring the empty tower that had been crowded and loud before, she looked to the sky and saw, for the first time, something clinging to the spire.

"The snakeskin," she said to herself, entranced by the monster she saw, "it's still in its hand. It's so much bigger now."

"What?" The hunter looked back and, following her gaze, saw the monster. "You can see the Amygdala? Snakeskin?"

"Shouldn't I? I saw it snatch up the snakeskin that came off your back."

"When-- What?"

Ifeye cradled the child closer to her chest, the creature called the Amygdala creating nothing but discomfort and placeless fear in her guts, and wondered how to answer. It had been so foggy when it happened, and so hectic in her mind. It had hurt, too, to touch it and see. 

"I think there was a snakeskin on your back," she said, unsure how else to say what she saw. 

"There are snakes in the forest," the hunter conceded, "but I don't understand what the Amygdala would want with a snakeskin. It usually snatches _people_ up."

"Oh," she realized. "You did not want me to go outside for fear of the Amygdala. The safest place in Yharnam is guarded by _that_ monster."

"Don't be fooled into assigning it any reason or purpose," the hunter told her forebodingly. "It's a mindless amalgamation of terror and fear. That is all."

"It still has the snakeskin in its hand."

At this, the hunter did look at the thing more closely, and he broke his intense, familiar stare into her eyes to turn his own towards the creature atop the spire. He looked for a long time, and then, he took out a simple lens on a chain. A monocular, she noticed. She wanted to see through the strange device too, she realized, but the hunter looked to be studying the creature. 

"That's no snakeskin," he said. "It's writhing, like a tentacle on an octopus."

"I suppose it isn't; it did come to life when I held it."

The hunter tore his gaze away from the lens and stared at her in what was becoming a way as familiar as his eyes. "What?" This was becoming a familiar word from him.

Ifeye gestured to the tower. "Shall we go?" The hunter followed her hand, but he seemed reluctant to leave. She was tired of the monster on the spire, and she wanted to leave it. The sight of it hurt her head, and it frightened her in a deep, steady way that she did not like.

"I don't think it was a snake, nor a snakeskin," he said again. "You said it was on my back? Did it glow?"

"No, it was inky black."

The hunter stared into the device, watching the Amygdala until it turned, slowly, to face them. Her head began to ache to see its eyes, swirling about, it did not see them, but it sensed something. 

"The scholar," the hunter said, finally, unfazed by the Amygdala's movement. "That scholar in the college. She summoned these."

"I do not know what you mean," Ifeye said honestly, a little confused about his worry.

"You held it?"

"Yes."

"And it came alive?"

"Yes."

"She summoned things. They did not grow from her; she summoned them from beyond. Damn it. And you held it?"

"I did," Ifeye said. "Who was she?"

"A scholar. A monster. I'm not sure. You've touched something from the Great Ones," he said dully. "And you survived it with your sanity intact. All that work to keep you safe, to keep you inside, and you went and did this." The hunter stood without moving for a moment, watching her with something unreadable in his gaze, then, finally, he passed her. The tower was empty, the spire was far away, and she did not care to ask what it was that she had held, briefly, in the chapel that night. They moved on, passing around the entrance and following the ridge-like path around the tower towards the back.

The hunter’s back looked broader than before, somehow, as he walked ahead of her. They continued to follow the curve of the tower until they reached a sudden break in the smooth stone. He leapt down, balancing the dweller in one arm, and then stretched out his hand to help her down too. She took it.

“Where did all those men from before go?”

He did not answer.

He left her at the top of the drop into blackness. “Wait only a moment, and I will come back for you,” he said. She had no idea how he could, since she saw no ladder, no rope, nothing that would aid this, but she did not say anything. He leapt down, the dweller in his grip still, and left her atop the tower’s sheer drop into empty space. She held the child, now squirming more than ever, in her arms and tried to find a place to stroke it, to pet it gently, to calm it down. It seemed to respond well to a light stroke on its forehead. She did this until its cries became little whimpers that echoed in the emptiness, the only sounds until footsteps came behind her. She did not turn around, used to the ways of the hunter now. “Hunter,” she greeted him.

The hunter chuckled. “I suppose I can’t shock you anymore, can I?” he asked.

“You’ve always had a quiet step,” she said, in a strange moment of intimate knowing. She did not know how it came out of her, but it did, easily. He took her in his arms and dropped down, the cool air hit her cheeks as they fell, he with practiced ease, her with only a slight terror, and the child with glee.

When she opened her eyes, she saw a door opening, the hunter stepping through, and flowers. Fields of flowers, a scent that was peculiar but familiar, and a house with peeling paint and a beautiful strength to its shape; she looked upon someone’s home.

“What is this?” she asked, hushed and awed.

“The old workshop,” he said. “It’s long abandoned, but it’s the safest place in Yharnam. The truly safest place in Yharnam.”

“I—” she shook her head, shaking off the doubt, “thank you for bringing us here.” He took her hand in hers again, gently, and simply held it for a moment.

“I have to ask you to do something you will not appreciate,” he said. “I need to ask you to remain here, safe, until I return. You must not leave until the sun rises. I have something I must do, but when I return—I will return here, to you.”

She looked at his hand, part of her shocked at the forwardness of the action and of his words, but another part of her knew him and did not fear it. “I’ll wait as long as I can,” she said honestly. “Sir, you clearly know me, but do I know you?”

“You will,” he said with clear relief and hope. “I swear you will, when the night is over. You’ll remember me, and you’ll remember our life before this hell.”

She held the child closely to her chest, and felt its eyes blinking against her bare collar. “What will happen to me? To the child?”

“Nothing,” he said after a long silence. “I will help you clean, and we will wake the dweller,” he assured her, “but after that I have to be gone.”

“I understand,” she replied, though she did not. “Is there a kitchen?”

“Should be,” he murmured, lost somewhere else, though his eyes were on her.

There was not a kitchen, she discovered. But she made one. She needed to, after the hunter did not return. The hunt was over within what felt like an hour; the sun rose, or at least that was what she remembered. The child grew hungry in the early hours of dawn, so she was forced to find a way out. She could not leave through the door the hunter had brought her, not at first, but with some loose wood she built a serviceable ladder, and found a way down to the paths far, far below, and from there found a way into the Ward. She brought the child with her, wrapped up in her shawl again, because the dweller still slept.

When she came back burdened with fruits, vegetables, meats, and supplies, and lighter for gold, he awoke and wept. They wept together, at first, but then the sun pooled into the little house and she decided a fire would be in order, if they wanted to cook the meat. This order of work allowed her to forget the way her mind cleared, the way her memories came out of their caves—

The creature atop the spire was still there, but ask though she might of the straggling remnants of the night, there would be no answer to her inquiry. Each person she questioned looked up to the spire, moaned slightly, and then carried about on their way. 

The snakeskin, she was sure now, was not a snakeskin. She had time alone with nothing to do but think, and she had books to read that made clear sense. She looked through each tome, and found frighteningly little on the Amygdala or snake-like beasts. The books simply did not account for them, and this was a hunter's workshop, so this should be the place where the information would _have_ to be, if it were to be anywhere. There was no explanation for her headaches, though there was a hastily scrawled note in a margin on the Church's litanies that eyes on the inside _hurt_ so much. 

Eyes on the inside. 

The holes in her head and the pain she'd felt were connected, and her mind rather likened the phrase she read here to the sensation she had felt, but there was no ready explanation for the thing she had come into contact with. She assumed, however, that it was not from the forest. No, there was another place the hunter might have brought it in from. She did not know what it was, nor what it looked like, but she had a feeling it was connected to the glowing lantern she had seen in his wake. 

This was how time went, now that the sun had risen and the house needed menial tasks to run. Her mind could only sift through the sand and look for things that did not fall through the holes inside, the things that would remain at the surface, demanding answers.

Mina had been killed for being an outsider, just like Ifeye was an outsider, just like Ifeye’s husband was an outsider. They had come from far away, all the way here, looking for a cure for his strange illness. She had kissed him goodbye at the clinic, had sworn to come see him when she was able, and then she had gone to work at the manor, barely on time and ready to face the wrath of her employer. 

But that night Mina had been thrown out with Ifeye, into the streets, to keep the little ones safe from the evil they brought in from the outside. To Mina's death, the left the manor and walked the streets. Outsiders brought the beast plague, the men said, before they fired their guns with mismatched arms and bleeding eyes. Mina had died because the beasts did not know they were beasts.

These were the difficult parts of the new life. She did not return to work, but she found gold in the house, and so she did not want to; even if they had not thrown her and Mina out to die, she would not have worked in Yharnam if she could help it. She would have left, but the dweller deserved better, and the child— She loved the child. But more than that, she knew the hunter would come back. He'd kept every promise so far. She had survived, the hunt ended, she _remembered_ him, and he was truly cured now. Gone were his glassy, far-off gazes, the labored breaths, the fits of coughing; he was like she remembered him _before_. 

So, she waited.

Yharnam was in flames, but that did not concern her. Mina's death hung heavy over her still, and her husband's hands in the Yharnam man's chest still filled her with grief. How scared he must have been, to think she would die a stranger. How strange the night was--

She knew, now, how strangely twisted Yharnam was. How it twisted her with it, how quickly her mind had fallen apart when it wanted her to fall softly out of the way. But she hadn't fallen away. And she did not plan to. So, the spire she left to the far recesses of her mind, the strange snake-like tendril of memory she'd found on the hunter she forgot, and the beasthood of the child... She accepted it without fear.

On the third day they found the ladder that allowed access to the upper level, where beds and bathrooms were. But the dweller decided to return to the chapel, to help who he could with his knowledge, and bid her visit whenever she could. He followed the makeshift path she'd made, and then she'd helped him the way the hunter had, on her back the rest of the way. She tried to visit him after that, and she often brought him things she thought he might like from her forays into the sluggish, ruined markets. He asked after the hunter often, and each time she swore that the moment he returned, the dweller would know of it. She never saw Adella again, and she never returned to the little library at the foot of the stairs, but she stood before the dweller when she could and she remembered with him the night of the hunt. 

She found a cellar to store the food, and a serviceable well in the flowers that brought forth good, fresh water, and she dug a hole in the earth to create a small, crude oven. Breakfast was hasty, and so was every other meal at first, but when the sun rose and set thirty times, she had managed to make a hut and a little kitchen—external and detached from the main house, yes, but it worked. The child followed her outside easily, growing quickly now that it knew how to, and it spoke in a wordless, symbolic way, directly into her mind. She knew when it was hungry, tired, sad, and when it wanted her to touch it. She knew when it missed the hunter, when it missed the dweller. She could not take it outside, not yet, for she did not know what others would see. So they sat together in the quiet, cooking and reading, and speaking in silence.

It loved touch, and it could not touch any other, so it loved to touch her. She suspected it had something to do with the bite in her neck, which did leave a mark, though it broke no skin. She pet its sweet face every morning to wake it, and then one day she realized that it had grown. Steadily, so she did not completely notice, it had grown. 

It was covered in the long, strange tendrils she had seen the night of the hunt; like snakeskin at first, but solid, like-- She stroked its little forehead in the gentle way it liked and it awoke after a long stretch, which was the way it yawned. She wondered how many others like it were out there, in the night; and how many others had been killed so ruthlessly. 

"It's time for breakfast," she said. 

The workshop began to resemble a home after one hundred nights, and a few of the people of the chapel began to know her as a strange woman who waited, breathlessly, with the fervor of the faithful, for nights of the hunt.

A night did come, finally, that answered her prayers. On that night, a red moon shone on the statue of the Saint, and the moon flowers shone red in its light too. She looked up that night, as the moon stood still for what felt like weeks, and waited as the thing descended, its presence weighing on her like her own shawl. The child stood behind her, its head lifted to the skies in imitation of her, its mind in her own, and a new presence—deep in her memory. They watched him come home.

The hunter never did return, not as she knew him at least, but her husband did. A great beast descended from the place the moon made, and it landed like a ray of moonlight in the flowers. Its hands came up to gently pull her closer, and she reached out her arms, weeping into its inky skin. It gripped her with a strength that should have been terrifying, that should have snapped her out of her relief, but it could not. It only sealed her happiness, and she kissed her husband's head sweetly as the child crooned curiosity into her mind. 

Another voice joined in, familiar and dry. "Ifeye," was all it said for a long time.

**Author's Note:**

> tell me what you think 💗


End file.
